Caring for our future stakeholder engagement

Following on from the recommendations of the Law and Dilnot commissions on social care reform, the Secretary of State for Health Andrew Lansley announced plans to publish a white paper on social care reform the following spring and the government launched a stakeholder engagement exercise on improving care and support services, Caring for our future. The aim was to engage with users, families, carers and other stakeholders to inform proposals in the planned white paper.

The engagement policy paper acknowledged the challenges facing the social care sector regarding an ageing population, the need for more personalised care to meet people's expectations and the confusing existing system of accessing state support for care.

The engagement exercise focused on 6 themes:

• improving quality of services available to people and using workforce planning to achieve this
• supporting more personalisation of services to provide people with more information and choice about their care
• shaping local care services to make sure it meets people’s different needs
• developing prevention services to support people to retain their health and independence
• ensuring more effective integration (in partnership with the NHS Future Forum) between social care services and the NHS and other care providers
• considering the role of the financial services in supporting service users and their carers.

The engagement process finished on 2 December 2011, as planned.

In total, the government held over 300 engagement events and received more that 640 written responses as part of the exercise. The government published the Caring for our future white paper on 11 July 2012, which set out the main principles for reforming the care and support system, based on the findings from the engagement exercise.